beware that serial wacom are not supported with recent Windows operating systems. Even with a Serial to USB adapter (btw, you have to pick a brand that is known to work with Wacoms -- some of them do some sort of buffering which breaks the wacom protocol)

@Bernard, Do you think that this trick could be used to help with the driver issues interfacing the tablet pc digitizer? I know this is a different kind of port, but hacking the registry to read that there is a tablet there and then giving it the address might get the computer to install the tablet pc drivers. Just a thought, and it couldn't hurt to try it.

Sounds like a breakthrough. Well, that registry trick was a known one but your driver update trick is quite a gem! Thanks for putting all that time in finding out the magic recipe.

I personally still have my doubts with Windows 64 bits - which would be the killer solution. I will surely try it myself.

Would have to check what is so different between the driver files that makes the magic (INF files are just text files). Why did you not intentionaly use the most recent driver again?

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For the tabletPC:

It might be possible to use those drivers with the tabletPC Wacom sensors - would have to try it. Your trick could help there greatly.

We did not find the magic recipe to install the tabletPC drivers, UnderSampled seems to say that the installers (and potentially the driver code) looks for "ACPI" devices with a special id. (ACPI = devices on the motherboard). (I wonder if there might be ways to trick that ACPI list to add a "virtual" serial port. Anyway, that discussion should go into the other thread that talks about it.) If we find a way, we might be able to use the TabletPC drivers with Ultrapads.

I originally found someone talking about installing the old drivers, copy somewhere a file that was installed, then uninstall the whole thing. Then install last drivers (6.05-7 at the time) and replace a file with the file you saved earlier, or something like that, which didn't work on Win7.

Then I found this registry thing but it didn't work after installing the latest version, I thought "why not try with that 6.05-7 version" and for some mystical reason it worked.

Now I am facing an unexpected issue : after rebooting the PC, the tablet stopped working. But it came back after uninstalling/reinstalling the 6.05-7 drivers...

I am quite puzzled about this, any ideas ?

I have tried rebooting a few times, always the same un-re-install is needed. It is working smoothly afterwards though...

Regardless, I moved on to the monitor stripping step:

I had this Philips 170S5, which will be the first try.

The grey plastic was removed easily, showing the button line, easily disconnected thus should be easily put to use later.

Back view

Zoom on the ID

Removed the back plastic and alu to unveil the PSU in brown and the VGA controller in green

We can see that under the PCB is another shielding, which I removed to finally get access to the screen and light diffusion.

The only problem would be the light diffusion board which is a whopping 8mm thick O.O

I tried putting in + the screen on the tablet and it worked, now I need to manage to plug everything for a live test...

Image flickers a bit but it should be because of unstable connection due to somewhat chaotic setup

I should be able to put both the PSU and the VGA controller under the sensor board with proper shielding. Might even reuse the screen casing for those.

1 hour later...

Here is what it leads to :I've put the PSU and the VGA controller back in their casing, everything on top. Checked the connections, image is now stable. There is little to no jitter at all so far.

Of course if I want to be able to fold the header/column cables behind the sensor board, the screen has to be in the corner for now.

Which leads to the next issue:

What you see is the position difference between the pen and the cursor. the bottom right of a line is where the pen is, top left is where the cursor shows.

Since the screen is the the top left corner of the sensor board, it makes sense that there is a difference.

But depending on where the pen is, the difference varies. I think it is because of the resolution differences between the screen and the tablet, but I need tips on this one.

Now that I think about it, it could also come from the sensor mapping in the Wacom control panel. It would work better if the screen was better positionned on the sensor boards, which can only be achieved by getting longer cables, what do you all think ?

The difference is varying, but consistently on the X and Y axis. Which is expected since you do not seem to have done any mapping. You need to do a precise mapping between the screen and the tablet. This is a must for virtually all builds (unless the active area perfectly match the LCD screen).